“Plus you would have loved the uniform,” she adds, thinking of the row of white shirts tailored in London that hang on a bar in the sunlight of his bedroom, of his suits made in Naples not only to his measurements but also to his precise taste (no silk, no lining at all, only materials rough to the touch), his winter coat of wool so finely stitched that he avoids putting his hands in the pockets for fear of ruining it. Of his white leather boxing gloves, handmade by Winning in Japan to fit his slim fingers and wrists. She does not offer this evidence gladly. She would prefer to believe that the man she is sleeping with could not have been, under any circumstances, a Nazi. But by now she knows him well enough that she can’t truly disagree.

Along the shore of the lake, lovers spoon in the sunlight or under the alders, kissing or lazily stroking each other’s half-naked bodies, and whenever they pass an attractive couple, the German Boxer points them out with a sign of appreciation, or maybe even envy. He was happily married for nearly a decade, blazingly happy, as he describes it, until his wife, an actress, left him for the man who played Lancelot to her Guinevere in the Volksbühne. Since then he’s lost the feeling he’s had all his life of being blessed and untouchable. Those close to him see this as a positive development, he admits, since until his divorce felled him, he was often insufferable. But he has been broken by it, and he would have preferred to remain happy and insufferable than whatever he is now.

Arriving at the beer garden at the eastern end of the lake, they stop to have a drink. It is a Sunday, and the tables covered with red-and-white-checked cloths are crowded with Germans enjoying their nature. Joyful shouts of children float up from the water’s edge. The German Boxer is telling her that her older son’s lankiness and long arms, which he’s seen in a photo, would make him an excellent boxer, and it does not seem necessary to her to repeat that her son would never box, that her son is nearly as far from boxing as he is from being German. Not finding a foothold, the conversation moves on to Oktoberfest, and he begins to explain to her what a dirndl is.

“But you would have killed?” she asks now, though perhaps with less incredulity than she might have expressed toward someone who had not, on occasion, knocked out a stranger with a single punch, or nearly snapped the wooden bars of her headboard because in the midst of orgasm he experienced an uncontainable desire to destroy something.

“Of course I would have killed,” he says. “Killed while believing—having been built to believe—that I was doing the right thing.”

“I could never kill anyone,” she insists.